This is for Rena, and because I found it SO amusing. Straight from the Stanford Uni site:
Canadian cowboys appeared very similar to the cowhands across the border in the United States. A broad-brimmed hat for shelter from sun and rain, snug jeans, and high-heeled boots were standard garb. Although unpolished by the urban standards of Montreal or Quebec, Alberta cowboys could likely read and write. . . .
Ranch hands in Canada stand alone among the cowboys of the Americas in having very little negative imagery associate with them. In fact, Canadians go to considerable pains to distinguish their ”civilized” and cultured West from the violent, rough-and-tumble frontier to their south. . . . Historian L.G. Thomas noted of the not-so-wild Canadian West that ”the body is American but the spirit is English.”
Nineteenth-century sources recorded considerable differences in cowboy country north and south of the Forty-ninth Parallel. . . . The Calgary Herald in 1884 contrasted the cowboys of Canada and the United States. ”The rough and festive cowboy of Texas and Oregon has no counterpart here. Two or three beardless lads wear jingling spurs and ridiculous revolvers and walk with a slouch, [but] the genuine Alberta cowboy is a gentleman.”
Source: Slatta, Richard. Cowboys of the Americas. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990. 51.
